According to every poll worth its clipboard, Barcelona is the European city best loved by visitors, and to the current generation of cultural dilettantes and easyJetsetters it is almost impossible to imagine that it wasn’t ever thus.
This is the city’s triumph, and its own self-assurance is fortified with the quiet knowledge of how it got here. Over the centuries it has been buffeted by invading forces, fleeced by trade restrictions and strangled by autocratic central governments – and every time has bounced back prouder and more audacious. After the ‘grey years’, the interminable period between the end of the civil war and Franco’s dying breath, there was a huge zest for change, to move on to a new era. It stoked the desire to transform the city itself, while the Olympic bid and then the Games themselves provided extra incentive, not to mention cash.

The finest architects and urban planners were persuaded to take part in this vision. The axis upon which the project spun was the idea to ‘turn Barcelona around’ to face the sea, creating whole swathes of beach from virtual wasteland. Ugly high-rises flung up during the Franco regime were pulled down, derelict blocks razed to provide open spaces and parkland, and world-class artists and sculptors – Roy Lichtenstein, James Turrell, Claes Oldenburg and Eduardo Chillida among them -– commissioned to brighten up street corners. Along with the creation of the new Barcelona in bricks and mortar went the promotion of Barcelona-as-concept, a seductive cocktail of architecture, imagination, tradition, style, nightlife and primary colours.

Helped, in large part, by the legacy of Gaudí and the other Modernistes, which provided the city with a unique foundation both architecturally and in spirit, this was perhaps the most spectacular, and certainly the most deliberate, of Barcelona’s reinventions; it succeeded in large part because this image of creativity and vivacity simply fitted well with an idea of the city already held by many of its citizens. Thrown into the mix were the core values of nationalist pride and a delight in traditional ways, from dancing the sardana in front of the cathedral, to wheeling out the papier mâché giants at the first hint of a celebration.

Barcelona’s love of eccentricity had already brought about a wealth of quirky museums (such as those devoted to shoes, perfume, sewers, funeral carriages and mechanical toys), to which more were added. Its handsome but grimy façades were buffed up, its streets renamed and its churches restored. To see it nowadays it’s as if the drab decades were just a collective bad dream.

The last few years have been kind to Barcelona’s culture vultures. The vibrancy of Catalan theatre, less dependent on plot or dialogue than on a festive blend of music, choreography, multimedia sleight-of-hand and slick production values, added to the local love for light-hearted mega-productions, has sparked a spectacular growth in attendances in recent years. With television actors serving as theatre box-office draws these days, more and more venues are dedicated to unabashed money-making, with musical comedy at the forefront, but the trickle-down effect is to make people comfortable with the idea of a night out at the theatre.
Classical music has been given a boost of a different kind, with a veritable rash of new concert halls, the latest of which will be a new, 700-seater Sala de Cambra due to open in autumn 2007 in L’Auditori. A couple of years ago the Palau de la Música Catalana unveiled its new, acoustically excellent, subterranean 500-seater auditorium, while, previous to that, the phoenix-like Liceu opera house spread its wings, Rafael Moneo’s stark L’Auditori provided the city with a bleeding-edge concert hall and the Auditori Winterthur became a small, charming outpost in the otherwise soulless business and university district. These venue changes have been supplemented by a subtle switch in repertoire. The canon still reigns, of course. But as a younger generation of cultural programmers takes charge, newer work has found an audience. You no longer have to be dead to get your music heard.

Key players

The last few years have seen the deaths of two leading Catalan composers – Joaquim Homs and Xavier Montsalvatge – leaving Joan Guinjoan as Catalonia’s most important living composer. Another local, manic genius Carles Santos, composes, directs and performs in surreal operatic-theatrical performances that combine sex, psychology and sopranos. Now in his sixties, he still manages to average a new show a year. Key Catalan theatre players making waves internationally include La Fura dels Baus, Els Comediants and Tricicle, while Dagoll Dagom creates huge money-spinning musicals. And don’t forget ever-controversial Calixto Bieito: renowned for his wildly polemical interpretations of Hamlet and Don Giovanni, he’s directed classics at the Edinburgh Festival and worked at the English National Opera.

Dance moves

Barcelona has many thriving contemporary dance companies, but there are few major dance venues and most companies spend their time touring. Performers such as Pina Bausch and the Compañía Nacional de Danza (directed by the revered Nacho Duato) have played to sell-out crowds in the Teatre Nacional and the Liceu, while the Teatre Nacional has a resident company led by Marta Carrasco and the Teatre Lliure (Plaça Margarida Xirgú, Montjuïc, 93 289 27 70, http://www.teatrelliure.com) hosts new work. However, it’s difficult for companies to find big audiences. Innovative companies such as Sol Picó and Mar Gómez usually run a new show every year, as do influential companies such as Metros, Mudances and Gelabert-Azzopardi.

Festivals

The Festival del Grec, which takes place from June to August, is the mother of all Barcelona festivals, calling in impressive musicians, dance troupes and actors from all over the world; its open-air venues are magical on a summer night. The Marató de l’Espectacle is in June, with a fun but exhausting two nights of non-stop micro performances. Dies de Dansa offers three days of national and international dance in June and July, in sites such as the Port, the CCCB or the MACBA. Several music festivals are staged, the foremost of which are the Festival de Música Antiga and the Nous Sons festival of contemporary music, both in spring. In summer, the focus moves. Various museums hold small outdoor concerts, and there are weekly events in several city parks, particularly as part of July’s Clàssics als Parcs season.

It’s increasingly hard to tell where dinner ends and clubbing begins in Barcelona. A trend for multitasking restaurant-bar-club combinations has swept the city and there is a job for every DJ who wants to work.
Not so for musicians, however. A city council clampdown on late-night noise has closed over 80 bars, clubs and cultural associations in the last year and even iconic venues like La Boîte and Jazzroom have not escaped the pogrom. Of the bars that have remained open, many, like Barcelona Pipa Club, have ceased to stage live acts out of fear of huge fines.
In terms of music groups, Barcelona has scenes rather than any big emblematic bands. Jazz, indie, rock català and electronica are all well represented and local names to look out for at festivals such as BAM, Primavera Sound and Sónar include indie rockers Beef, electro-popper Iris and 12Twelve, an unclassifiable quartet bringing together free jazz, psychedelia and cosmic krautrock. Where Barcelona has had most international success is with mestizaje – a blend of influences including rock, flamenco, rai, hip hop, and various South American, Asian and African styles. The mestizaje top draws at the moment are Ojos de Brujo and the Raval’s 08001.

Clubbing
In a city where everybody wants to be a DJ, local standouts are Will Deluxe for electrotech, Annemiek’s dirty house (CDLC, Private Lifestyle events), and DJ Fra, who had a big hit in production duo Ferenc with ‘Yes Sir, I Can Hardcore’.
One of the most successful new clubs on the scene has been Fellini, indulging Barcelona’s insatiable appetite for all things house and techno. Its older and far more glamorous sister is La Terrrazza – Barcelona’s best and best-loved open-air summer club – which reopened after a year closed because of neighbours’ complaints in time for its tenth anniversary in May 2006. Also recreating that Ibiza feeling is Private Lifestyle’s new all-day (noon-3am) Sunday beachfront party in Shôko. Back indoors, grown-up clubbers heaved a sigh of relief when old-school night, Mond Club, was brought back in April 2006 after a ten-month hiatus. It now lives at Fellini (last Thursday of the month).

Concerts

The main venue for international names (as well as hotly tipped unknowns and local musicians) is the multi-faceted industrial space Razzmatazz, which has recently hosted everything from Arctic Monkeys and Rufus Wainwright to where-are-they-now bands like Sisters of Mercy. Moving into fallback position, the mall-like Bikini still nets some top-notch international names and plenty of local stars. For weirder and less well-known acts, the old dancehalls Sala Apolo, Luz de Gas and La Paloma host several concerts a week. Global superstars perform in Montjuïc’s sports stadiums, one of which has recently become the Barcelona Teatre Musical.

When to go

Going out in Barcelona happens so late it’s early. People rarely meet for a drink before 11pm and it’s not until the bars turf everyone out at 3am that clubs (mumsily known as discotecas) get going. As elsewhere, the biggest nights are Thursday to Saturday, but Sunday teatime chill-out sessions are catching on.


To most visitors, it comes as first a surprise and then something of a relief, that, unlike most phenomenally popular cities, Barcelona does not boast a list of ‘must-see’ sights to be queued in front of, paid for, ticked off and photographed. The real joy of this sunny and easygoing Mediterranean city lies in its very fabric, thanks to the Catalan love of design, colour and the slightly bizarre.
While no major tourist venues have opened in recent years, there has been a blitz of extraordinary architecture, including Jean Nouvel’s Torre Agbar, Herzog & de Meuron’s Edificio Fòrum and Enric Miralles’ Mercat Santa Caterina, which will soon be followed by a glittering new museum building by Frank Gehry in La Sagrera.

Barcelona, then, is the perfect city in which to walk. Most visitors will head first to the Old City, a maze of meandering streets, alleys and squares, where Gothic churches nestle next to lofty palaces, and ancient fountains trickle in quiet plaças. Beyond lie the architectural glories of Gaudí and the Modernistas, the long stretch of beach, the hills of Montjuïc and Tibidabo, and parts of the city with a wholly different feel, untouched by the hand of tourism.

Barrio by barrio

Cutting straight through the Old City are La Rambla and Via Laietana. La Rambla, once a seasonal riverbed that formed the western limit of the 13th-century city, is now a tree-lined boulevard dividing the medieval buildings and cathedral of the Barri Gòtic from the Raval, home to the MACBA and the CCCB. The nocturnal hugger-mugger of drunks, cutpurses and prostitutes, although not completely without attraction, is redolent of the city’s unkempt years as a hard-edged port. Via Laietana, driven through in the 19th century to bring light and air to the slums, is the boundary between the Barri Gòtic, and Sant Pere and the achingly trendy Born, where you’ll find the stunning Palau de la Música Catalana, the Museu Picasso and the Parc de la Ciutadella. Between these two thoroughfares is the Plaça Sant Jaume, the heart of the city ever since it was the centre of the Roman fort from which Barcelona grew. Now it is home to two bastions of government, the Ajuntament (City Hall) and the Generalitat (the regional government).

With the demolition of the medieval walls in 1854, the open fields beyond the choleric city were a blank canvas for urban planners, architects and sculptors. The Eixample (literally, the ‘expansion’), with its gridiron layout, is a showcase for the greatest works of Modernisme, including the Sagrada Família, La Pedrera and the Hospital de la Santa Creu i Sant Pau. When the only traffic was the clip-clopping of the horse and cart, these whimsical flights of architectural fancy must have been still more impressive; nowadays the Eixample can be noisy and polluted, as almost every road carries four lanes of traffic. Beyond lies the Park Güell, with Gaudí’s emblematic dragon, and barrios such as Gràcia, Sants and Sarrià, once independent towns but long since swallowed up and incorporated into the expanding city.

Getting around

The Old City is wonderfully compact and can be crossed on foot in about 20 minutes. The city council runs walking tours on various themes (Modernisme, Picasso, Gourmet and Gothic) at weekends and on other occasional days. For more information, see http://www.barcelonaturisme.com. Run by the city council, these popular walking tours have just increased to add a ‘gourmet tour’, including 13 stops in the city’s emblematic cafés, food shops and markets. Tours start in the underground tourist office in Plaça Catalunya. The Gothic tour concentrates on the history and buildings of the Old City, while the Picasso visits the artist’s haunts and ends with a visit to the Picasso Museum (entry is included in the price).

The Modernisme tour is a circut of the ‘Golden Square’ in the Eixample, taking in Gaudí’s Casa Batlló and La Pedrera. Tours take around 90mins to 2hrs, excluding the museum trip. A fun and eco-friendly way to get around it (and to head to the beach) is to hire a bright yellow Trixi rickshaw. Running noon to 8pm, April to September, and costing €1.50 per person/kilometre, they can be hailed on the street, or booked on 93 310 13 79 or http://www.trixi.com. The public transport system, including a recently inaugurated tram network, serves every part of the city and is cheap and efficient.

There are two tourist buses seen all over town: the orange Barcelona Tours and the white Bus Turistic. The former is less frequent but less popular, meaning you won’t have to queue, while the latter gives a book of discounts for various attractions. Both visit many of the same sights and cost much the same.

Tickets

As well as those given with the Bus Turístic passes, a range of discount passes exists. The Articket (http://www.articketbcn.com, €20) gives free entry to seven museums and art galleries over three months: Fundació Miró, MACBA, the MNAC, Espai Gaudí-La Pedrera, the Fundació Tàpies, the CCCB and (a new addition in 2006) the Museu Picasso. The ticket is available from participating venues and tourist offices.

The Barcelona Card (€17) gives one to five days of unlimited transport on the metro and buses, as well as discounts on the airport bus and cable cars, reduced entry to a wide variety of museums and attractions, and discounts at several restaurants, bars and shops. The card is sold at the airport, tourist offices and various participating venues.

A word of warning

Violent crime is almost unknown in Barcelona, but bag-snatching and pickpocketing are rife – the former especially occurs in the Old City and on the beach, the latter on public transport and along La Rambla. Leave whatever you can in your hotel, and be wary of anyone trying to clean something off your shoulder or sell you a posy or a newspaper. Those wanting to swap a coin for one from your country are also wont to empty your wallet.

Great shopping is nothing new in Barcelona. Ever since the Middle Ages it has been a city of craftsmen and traders, and though modern shoppers may be seeking Camper shoes rather than fishermen’s clogs, it remains one of the top commercial destinations on the Mediterranean.
Like any other western city, mall culture is growing and the main shopping arteries are increasingly dominated by chains, but this invasion does not seem to have affected Barcelona’s love affair with small speciality stores. Shops in the Old City are just as likely to sell homemade sausage or espadrilles as they are Nike trainers or Levi’s.

Barcelona’s famous obsession with originality and design is echoed in the incredible number of new openings devoted to boutique fashion, jewellery, furniture and interior decor. Nobody seems to open shops that aren’t cool and, as the shoe repairers and ironmongers give way to futon shops and hairdressing salons, one wonders how the city’s shoppers can support such a quantity of luxury goods. Not to mention where they might buy something as dully utilitarian as a stopcock or printer cartridge.

Market trends

Market shopping is on the rise among young people, and recent surveys show that over half of citizens aged 25 to 34 regularly shop at municipal markets. This is at least partly due to a huge municipal advertising campaign and a €50-million programme to reinvent Barcelona’s markets. Of the most central, Santa Caterina and Poblenou are newly completed, Barceloneta is due to reopen in March 2007 and the much-loved Mercat Sant Antoni will be closed from 2007 to 2010 while it is transformed into ‘the most modern market in Europe’. This being Barcelona, the makeovers are architecturally striking – none more so than Enric Miralles’ undulating Mercat de Santa Caterina – and they have also become focal points for urban redevelopment.

Despite all the noise about eating fresh greens, the irony is that the new generation of markets generally hold far fewer stalls than before, with the extra space turned over to incorporate supermarkets, restaurants and even internet cafés. Speciality storesBarcelona’s rich and thriving scene of tiny speciality shops has attracted an ever-growing number of foreign small traders, be they traders in Moroccan slippers or Chinese calligraphy pens. Barcelona’s best source for Spanish farmhouse cheeses, Formatgeria La Seu, is owned by a Scottish woman, while the friendly candymakers boiling and rolling up sweets at Papabubble are Australian. Fertile areas for browsing include the Barri Gòtic, Born, Raval and Gràcia.

Fashion first

It’s not all Mango and Zara. Barcelona’s reputation as a haven for niche-label designers is growing thanks to the constant stream of new designers from the city’s prestigious fashion schools. Young designers to look out for when you’re browsing through the flash-in-the-pan boutiques around C/Avinyó in the Barri Gòtic, the MACBA area in the Raval or C/Verdi in Gràcia include Raquel Cardona, Juma Alemany, Alberto Tous and Helena Minenko. At the top of the heap, Custodio Dalmau’s label, Custo Barcelona, is the city’s major success story but other big guns include Josep Font, Lydia Delgado and Antonio Miró, all to be found uptown.


Design for life

Nowhere beats Barcelona for sharp, original design. For anyone who aspires to an apartment resembling a designer bar, Vinçon and BD Ediciones de Diseño have the slickest furniture and household goods and are both located in stunning Modernista buildings.

For something quirky, try the eccentric collections at Ici et Là. The Mercado del Borne (http://www.mercadodelborne.com) grabs the zeitgeist with constantly changing collections of independent design and art from all over the world.

Neighbourhood watch

Shops in Barcelona match their context so neatly that they can almost seem to be part of a giant themed architectural park. The Eixample’s expansive boulevards and Modernista architecture complement its wealth of upmarket designer furniture, fashion and homeware stores – here, even the more prosaic pharmacies and grocers’ are minor architectural miracles. Passeig de Gràcia is becoming known as one of the world’s great shopping avenues, studded with Spanish stars such as the redoubtable Adolfo Domínguez along with countless international luminaries. Running parallel, Rambla de Catalunya boasts lingerie shops, chains and upmarket stores.

The Barri Gòtic’s narrow streets and restored medieval spaces are home to a jumble of small craft shops, antique dealers and specialist outlets selling anything from religious candles to carnival masks and anchovy-flavoured bonbons. Crossing over Via Laietana to the Born, the terrain becomes noticeably more design-oriented with an ever-changing selection of boutique fashion, accessories, furniture and shoes. A victim of its own success, the Born buzz has recently been attracting some of the bigger chains.

The new frontier lies across the fashion vacuum of La Rambla, in the Raval, particularly in the newly manicured area between the MACBA and C/Carme where independent designers showcase experimental art and clothes. The rest of the area is noticeably edgier and still holds fast to its bohemian aesthetic with plenty of music shops, second-hand outlets and ethnic wares reflecting the global broil of immigrants who live there.

For a friendly touch, the village-like environments of Sarrià and Gràcia give an intimacy to antique or clothes shopping while at the other end of the scale, the wide open spaces of Plaça de Catalunya or the shoreline lend themselves to large-scale commerce at malls such as Diagonal Mar and Maremàgnum, not forgetting Spain’s department store behemoth, El Corte Inglés.


Opening hours

Increasing numbers of shops are adopting a European timetable and staying open through the siesta period, although most small independent stores still stick to the traditional opening times of 10am-2pm and 5-8pm Monday to Saturday. Don’t be surprised to see many shutters down on Saturday afternoons, especially in the summertime. Many shops close for at least two weeks in August. Except for the run up to Christmas, Sunday opening is still limited to shops in tourist zones such as La Rambla and the Maremàgnum. Many newspaper kiosks, bakeries and flower stalls are open Sunday mornings and many convenience stores stay open all day.

Shop tactics

Bargain-hunters should note that sales (rebaixes or rebajas) begin after the retail orgy of Christmas and Epiphany, running from 7 January to mid February, and again during July and August. Barcelona’s tourist offices stock free Shopping Guide booklets with an accompanying map and advice on everything from how to get your VAT refund at the airport to using the Barcelona Shopping Line bus.

Paying away

When the euro came in, anything that had previously cost 100 pesetas was cunningly rounded up to one euro – an overnight price hike of 66 per cent. In other words, cheap shopping in Barcelona is a thing of the past, although at least local wines and home-grown designs like Zara, Mango and Camper are still significantly less pricey here than abroad.

Bargaining should only be attempted at the Els Encants flea-market or when haggling over Sagrada Família snowglobes on La Rambla; in shops, prices are fixed. As long as you’re spending over €10 or so, all but the most cobwebby of places now accept major credit cards. Almost nowhere has chip-and-pin machines installed yet, but you will be required to show some form of picture ID.